We Built A Website In Under An Hour

The thing about Squarespace is there's so much choice. Using its professionally-designed templates you can quickly and easily build an online portfolio, a website for your wedding, start a blog, or even use it for your business.

Whatever your reason for building a website, what you want is one which looks great on mobiles and desktop computers; isn't slowed down by bandwidth or storage limits; and enables you to keep an eye on useful things, such as how many people are looking at your site, what they're reading and how they're finding you.

And if you need help, you want someone there any time of the day or night, who'll help you for free. No late night calls to a mate of yours who "knows a bit about computers".

What you don't want is something that's really hard to build, takes loads of time and technical know-how, and costs loads of money.

This is how easy it is to create a good looking website — quickly, using Squarespace.

First off — we needed a topic for our website.

We asked you what you'd like to see us build a website about. One reader, Laura, told us she'd like to see "a website about what it's really like to live in London from regular, everyday Londoners. I want to know about the pros and cons, the daily struggles and joys, and advice for others contemplating a move to London".

No problem, Laura.

Here's how we made it less than an hour:

It's really easy to sign-up for a trial, just enter your email and a few details and you're off.

Then you can pick from hundreds of great-looking designs.

We plumped for one, filled out a couple of steps which help with telling people what our website is about and what our aims are:

And then we got designing...

The above is what we started with. It gives you the basics, and allows you to change them as you see fit.

First things first; to get some top tips for living in London added to the site. A couple of clicks and we had added in our dedicated Twitter account (the design we selected also allows you to set up special Twitter searches).

Then we needed to change the image to something more Londony:

That's better.

It's also really easy to use the tools to make your website really professional looking, with a favicon, a proper search engine description, and social sharing imagery. You can also add Google Analytics, get an email address, and even more advanced things such as add code (if you're technically-minded, or have instructions from someone who is).